Kate Betts, the former Editor-in-Chief of Harper's Bazaar, reviews The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef about working at Vogue under editor Anna Wintour. Betts tears into Weisberger, criticizing her for the character's (read: Weisberger's) superiority complex: "Andrea makes no bones about the fashion business being beneath her, or that her true calling is not to be fetching tall lattes for Anna/Miranda but to be supplying high-minded prose for The New Yorker."

Last night, at the Housing Works bookstore SoHo, the annual book party for authors who work at the New Yorker. How to tell the party was winding down and it was time to move on? Overheard: "It's just the fact-checkers left."

The New Yorker notes that the Paris Review and Playboy both turn 50 this month. (But being the New Yorker, the article is 5% Playboy and 95% Paris Review.) The article notes that Paris Review back issues were supposed to be transferred from founding editor George Plimpton's mother's garage to a warehouse in the Bronx, but there was a "rat problem." The rats had apparently eaten through several volumes. [Ed. noteThere will be no mention of metaphors or indigestion in this post.]
A little old magazine [New Yorker]

The hipster literary movement has officially kicked into disaffected ironic overdrive. Twenty-three year old David Amsden's new book Important Things That Don't Matter chronicles the life of a twenty-year old in Rockville, MD. The character's parents are divorced and a typical scene in the book has "the main character as a child watching a pornographic film on videotape while his father snorts cocaine." Amsden, a former New Yorker intern and sometime pal of photographer Ryan McGinley and Ken Park actress Tiffany Limos, lives in Williamsburg. His mantra: "You've got to have some sort of faith in people...at least in your ability to manipulate them." (He also has a Livejournal blog, but I can't find it. Anyone know where it is?)
Oh, to be a boldface name! [NYT]

Police [Lieutenant Bruce] Simonetti explains, "What we're doing is very similar to what the military does, and to what Israel has been doing for many years...Every surge starts with all thirty-six officers going to the same stationthe particular station changes each timeand then, after half an hour, dividing up, so that eighteen continue on together to the next station, while the other eighteen split up and go to two different stations, and so on through four stops. 'Anybody who s bad and wants to watch to see if we're creatures of habit, we re showing them we're not...We're creating confusion." Yes, they are. I thought the sudden appearance of 36 cops on the L train was just an issue of one cop inquiring of another, "hey, Jack, where are you going? Oh, the L? Hold up, I'm coming with!" and the other 34 following suit. But it's intentional. Ah.
The surge [New Yorker]

Vice magazine recruits a drunk guy to interview Bill McGowan (author of Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, which earned him the National Press Club Award) and Scott McConnell (the executive editor of Pat Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative) at the Greenpoint Tavern in Brooklyn. Unintentional hilarity ensues.

An "anonymous source inside the Condé Nast" building fact-checks my cafeteria report:

Thursday. 03.20.03. Thirteen hundred hours. I have successfully infiltrated the Conde Nast cafeteria. Over the course of the last few weeks, I have spent countless secondsentire minutes, evenin preparation for this mission. The careful transmission of multiple electronic mail messages to people on "the inside," the establishment of a plausible cover ("lunch"), and careful analysis of the enemy's behavioral patterns have paved the way for what will prove to be my most ambitious espionage operation yet.

Ex-Talk Editor Tina Brown's much anticipated talk show will be postponed because CNBC doesn't want to launch it just as the war in Iraq starts. (Right: Tina's reaction, perhaps?) "The last-minute change was reminiscent of her days at the helm of the New Yorker and Talk magazineswhere she was famous for tearing up nearly completed editions in the final hours for breaking news," writes Michael Starr.
How dare they! [NY Post]

The NYT recalls a recent appearance by former AOL/TW Chairman Ted Turner at a New Yorker breakfast in which he told his audience that he had volunteered to report from Iraq for CNN, sang verses of "Don't Fence Me In," and said he "relished the idea of challenging the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 72, to a fistfight." Murdoch's response: "The last thing Ted needs these days is a licking from me."
Turner jabs AOL Time Warner [NYT]

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki discovers the gambling addict's holy grail: an exchange that will let you bet on anything. The exchanges, trade shares in "decision" marketsi.e., the outcome of the next Presidential election, whether priests will be allowed to marry by 2005, when physicists will discover a Higgs boson.
Decisions, decisions [New Yorker]
Tradesports
NewsFutures
Hollywood Stock Exchange
Iowa Electronic Markets
Foresight Exchange

New Yorker Editor David Remnick and Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham are fighting over who thought of running Picasso's anti-war painting, Guernica, on their cover first. Actually that's not true. Guernica-gate paraphrased: Lapham is claims that "Remnick copiedno fair!" and thinks, in fact, that the New Yorker may have planted spies. Remnick responds with a very telling, "We have the same cover? I didn't notice." Guess Mr. Remnick doesn't read Harper's.
G+J planning gala debut [Keith Kelly - Post]

The New Yorker's Anthony Lane dissects the TNT-broadcasted cook-along for the SAG awards dinner. (You, too, can eat like a nominee!) "Chantarelle dust""not something you snort but a handful of mushrooms that you torch at insane heat until they are begging for mercy"is required, as are "endive leaves overlapping each other to make fan at twelve o'clock on plate." All ingredients are theoretically easy to obtain. Entourage, PR team, stylist, coke dealer, etc., are not, however, provided.
Eating like a nominee [New Yorker]

The New Yorker's Paul Goldberger raises the possibility that Daniel Libeskind's sunken memorial gets built at Ground Zero but the design for the buildings is discarded by the developers. "Libeskind s plan is easier to eviscerate than the THINK group's would have been."
The critics: the skyline [New Yorkers]

"If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank." "Selections from the Allen Notebooks," in The New Yorker (5 Nov. 1973)
Woody Allen [CelebAtheists.com]

The new eleven-digit phone numbers have propelled the New Yorker's Roger Angell into a reverie of nostalgia for long-lost exchange names, many of whichWIckersham, VAnderbilt, BOgardus, etc.,"suggested brokerage firms or Waspy lawyers."
Dial again [New Yorker]

The New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman claims on the Readerville message board that she does, in fact, pick submissions from the slush pile, (although she seems suspiciously surprised to find a published writer who got in that way.) She also saysfor the recordthat jokes about her nose don't bother her, that she's not going to publish only young Vietnamese women, and that she's not worried about people saying she has bad taste in fiction.
What is it about the New Yorker? [Readerville via Publisher's Lunch]
A bookworm as a child, now the talk of the town [NYT]

Fiction writers may want to note the Morning News' article on the New Yorker's fiction policies with regard to unsolicited pieces under new fiction editor Deborah Teisman. Says Teisman, "Someone who s submitting themselves directly to the fiction editor probably isn t all that savvy about publishing and probably not about writing either." Says the Morning News, "complete and utter ignorant, elitist moose-shit."
Among the Unsaavy [TMN]

Responding to Jeffrey Toobin's compliments on her silver chopsticks: "You know, in China they say, 'The thinner the chopsticks, the higher the social status.' Of course, I got the thinnest I could find." After a pause, she added, "That's why people hate me."
Lunch at Martha's [New Yorker]

People slated to write for Maer Roshan's new mag, Radar, include:
Jonathan van Meter, founding editor of Vibe; Jake Tapper, who wrote Down & Dirty for Little Brown about the Florida vote recount; Vanessa Grigoriadis, a contributing editor at New York; New Yorker contributor Mark Leyner; former Brill's Content media writer Katherine Rosman; and Toby Young, author of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People." (Hmmm... Toby Young and Tina Brown contributing to the same magazine... Bets on how long before the first restraining order?)
Blender getting spun by numbers mix-up [Keith Kelly - Post]